Astronomers discover a cosmic fracture of the Milky Way

This news was published on May 1, NASA published it verbatim and talks about a fracture in our galaxy. Astronomers have discovered a fracture in a huge cosmic “bone” of the Milky Way. They use the term bone because they make an image game because they compare this image with an x-ray, but in reality the term used until now to call these elongated objects is filaments.

The image is not taken with visible light because we cannot see the nucleus of the galaxy, there are a lot of clouds of gas and dust between us and the galactic nucleus so the way to see it has been thanks to NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory and also using radio telescopes combining the two elements we have been able to have these images.

The bone or filament seems to have been impacted by a neutron star or pulsar, which is the little dot you see there in the image. A Pulsar is a neutron star but it is spinning very quickly and this one in particular is also traveling very quickly through the cosmos. It is estimated that the Pulsar is traveling at a speed of between 1.6 and 3.2 million km/h, that is between two to almost four times faster than the sun moves around the galaxy.

Neutron stars are the densest stars known and are formed from the collapse and explosion of a massive star, often with that supernova that creates the neutron star, when the star explodes and creates that neutron star, that supernova explosion also pushes the neutron star and sends it out at high speed, but the question is what are those bones or filaments?

Near the galactic center are these enormous structures that NASA compares to bones or snakes, I'm going to stick with the filaments, they were discovered not so long ago, I think the first photo where they appeared was from 5 or 6 years ago, they are usually called elongated filaments, they are observed in the galactic center and can be captured by radio waves, as I said they cannot be seen with visible light since the galactic nucleus is hidden from us because of of dense clouds of gas and dust.

These filaments are intertwined by powerful magnetic fields that run parallel to them, they are really what give shape to the filament, this particular filament is called G359.13 and has a length of about 230 light years, it is one of the longest and brightest structures in the Milky Way, it is a shame that it is hidden by those clouds of gas and dust because if it were not like that it is not that far away, it is about 26,000 light years from Earth, it would be visible, we could see that filament, if it weren't for those clouds of gas and dust.

The filament is not a cloud of dust or smoke, it is not something ethereal, it is rather something energetic, there is a lot of energy concentrated in it, basically it would be plasma; astronomers have discovered that, at the impact site, at the fracture site they have used the Chandrad and Mercat data, they have discovered an X-ray source that is located near the pulsar from where electrons and positrons are coming out, positrons are antimatter, they are the opposite of electrons and all of them are accelerated to high energies by this collision.

It is assumed that they are caused by the supermassive black hole that is located in the galactic center Sagittarius A*, but we still do not know how they are really formed, it is another of the enigmas of the universe and we also do not know what implications they have.